6 Common (and Avoidable) High Ticket Dropshipping Mistakes
Every day, people dive into the world of high ticket dropshipping, enticed by its low startup costs and big revenue potential.
But if you don’t know the dropshipping mistakes to avoid, these waters can be treacherous.
That’s why we’ll share with you the most common dropshipping mistakes beginners make, and how to avoid them.
Here’s a roadmap for sidestepping these common Ecommerce pitfalls.
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Mistake #1: Choosing "No Man's Land" Products
Products priced between $200 to $700 are what we call “No Man’s Land” products. They aren’t low-ticket, but they’re not quite high ticket either.
While these products might sound easier to sell, the profit margins are slim. A $600 item might have a 30% margin. Your actual profit dwindles to practically nothing after you cover costs like Shopify fees, credit card charges, customer acquisition, and shipping. Unless you’re operating with a 50-60% margin (which is rare in dropshipping), these products won’t give you substantial returns.
For example, maybe you’re selling a smart home security system priced at $500. It might sell decently, even better than. No man’s land feels euphoric at times because you’re selling soooo many products. Revenue is through the roof! But there is almost never any profit left at the end of the day.
As my friend Mike Jackness says, “Revenue is vanity, and profit is sanity.”
Remember, competitors are selling similar systems, which means you have to work hard (and spend $$) to get every sale. If your margins are slim and you’re not factoring in potential returns or customer service requests, you might be facing more overhead than profits.
Avoid this mistake by ensuring your core product lineup isn’t concentrated in the $200-$700 range. Having some products in this category as supplementary or accessory items to higher-priced ones is fine, but they shouldn’t be your primary focus.
Mistake #2: Selling Only Trendy or Hot Products
Trendy or “hot” dropshipping items are ones that suddenly surge in popularity, often due to media buzz, influencer campaigns, or being featured on “top dropshipping products” lists. E-bikes and drones are two of our favorite over-hyped examples.
Focusing only on products like these is a big mistake. Here’s why:
- Over-saturation: If you’re hopping on the bandwagon, so are hundreds of others. This leads to intense competition.
- Reliability issues: Trendy products, especially new releases, can have unforeseen issues. For instance, e-bikes and drones faced early reliability and functionality challenges.
- Supply chain problems: A sudden rise in demand can strain suppliers, leading to delayed deliveries and problems keeping items in stock.
- Margin pressures: With increased competition, suppliers might reduce margins. That eats into your profitability.
- Advertising costs: High-demand products can inflate advertising costs and squeeze profit margins even more.
If everyone’s talking about selling a particular product, it might be an indicator to steer clear or approach with caution. Instead of selling what’s trending, find products where you can offer unique value, whether it’s in service, bundling, or content.
Instead of going after the current “hot product” on some guru’s list of favorites, conduct thorough market research to find high ticket dropshipping niches.
Here’s an overall tip for dropshipping success: Don’t just chase trends. Focus on building a solid, sustainable business model that doesn’t solely depend on the flavor of the month.
Mistake #3: Leaning on "Copy Pasta"
“Copy pasta” (or “copypasta”) is copying a chunk of text and pasting it repeatedly, typically on the internet. The term is a portmanteau of the words “copy” and “paste.”
Why is this a mistake in dropshipping?
When you directly lift product descriptions, images, and details from a supplier’s or manufacturer’s site, you miss out on the chance to make your store different from your competition. With copy pasta, your site looks generic, and you seem untrustworthy – which is exactly what you don’t want when trying to make a sale.
Not only does it make you look bad, but it also affects search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines, including Google, value original content. Using duplicate images and product descriptions can lower your site’s organic ranking. That makes it harder for your potential customers to find you.
Imagine a customer’s confusion when they search for a product on Google and see the same image and description over and over again, across a bunch of different stores. Monotony like this confuses your buyer and lowers the perceived value of your products.
And without a distinct voice or offers, your chances of converting browsers into buyers decrease considerably.
So, what should you do instead?
First off: Personalize your content. Picture yourself engaging with shoppers in a physical store. How would you talk to them? How would you address their questions and talk about their pain points? Customize your product descriptions and make them clear and compelling.
Next up, make your imagery unique. Don’t just use the generic product photos from the manufacturer’s website. Attend trade shows, visit suppliers in person, or get product samples and do photoshoots to get your own distinct images.
New and different offers, bundles, or added services can also help you stand out from competitors online.
So avoid the “copy pasta” trap. Prioritize unique, engaging content that creates a great user experience, boosts SEO, and increases your conversion rate.
Mistake #4: Setting Up and Running Ads the Wrong Way
One of the biggest (and most expensive) mistakes dropshippers make is mismanaging their ads.
Many people assume social media ads will give them the most bang for their buck when selling high ticket products – but that’s not the best approach.
People don’t go to Facebook or Instagram looking to buy. They’re on these platforms to connect with other people and be entertained. Interrupting their scrolling with an ad for a high ticket product is just a fancy way of flushing your advertising and marketing budget down the toilet.
Let’s take the $10,000 luxury watch market. Promoting high-end watches on a platform where users are looking for fashion inspiration (like Instagram) might seem like a good idea. But, the click-through rate for these ads might be abysmal because users aren’t on Instagram intending to make such a significant purchase.
Instead, focus your ad budget on platforms where intent is higher – like Google search.
When people are ready to buy expensive products, they usually research online. That means using search engines, making Google Ads the better choice. This will increase your chances of being profitable so you can make money dropshipping.
Another big way of mismanaging your ads is using Performance Max advertising.
What Are Performance Max Ads?
Performance Max ads are Google Ads that run across a wide variety of platforms, including YouTube, Search, Display, Gmail, and Discover. These ads leverage Google’s machine learning algorithms to allocate your budget across channels automatically.
Sounds potentially positive, right? Max often feels like the “easy” button for ads.
But there are a lot of pitfalls, which is why we advise high ticker dropshippers to steer away from Performance Max.
If you don’t understand the metrics and data Google Ads is providing, you might not know if your ad campaign is underperforming or if you’re getting a good return on your investment. It’s also really easy to overspend if you’re not paying attention to how your budget is distributed.
We’ve seen dozens of people, prompted by advice from dropshipping “gurus,” pouring money into Performance Max, only to face disappointment.
They believed it was the golden ticket to dropshipping success. The reality? A gaping hole in their ad budget with minimal returns.
Here’s the Key to Maximizing Your ROI from Ads
So, if you’re not going to “set it and forget it” with Performance Max ads, what should you do to avoid this common dropshipping mistake?
We recommend using the three-tiered funnel, also known as the “inverted funnel.” We find it very reliable for high ticket dropshipping. Though we discuss it in our course, we didn’t invent it. The strategy traces back to an old marketing video about Nike shoes.
The inverted funnel approach lets you categorize and tailor your ad spend and messaging based on where potential customers are in the buying journey. This helps you optimize your campaigns for conversions and ROI.
We can’t explain the entire ads strategy here (we’d need a lot more space!), but you can learn the entire process, step by step, in our Dropship Breakthru course.
Mistake #5: Having a Bad Attitude Toward Returns
A common pain point for dropshippers, especially in high ticket, is return requests.
But rather than viewing returns as a setback, treat them as an opportunity to earn the trust of your customers.
Create a clear, fair, easy-to-understand returns policy and publish it prominently on your site.
Handle all return requests quickly and professionally. Provide return labels, have a straightforward process, and consider offering longer return windows.
The goal is to remove any purchase hesitations and reinforce the idea that buying from your store is risk-free. When you do this, your customer satisfaction rates will go up, and you’ll bring in more sales.
Mistake #6: Overlooking SEO in the Early Days
SEO is one of the most effective ways to market your dropshipping business. It might even be the most effective way.
Unfortunately, beginners often ignore it when they’re just starting out. They only focus on ads. And while this does get quick traffic coming in, it gets expensive fast. It’s also not as profitable as bringing in organic traffic.
Newbies will get two years into their Ecommerce businesses and then wish they’d gotten started with SEO earlier.
So head those regrets off at the pass, and get started with SEO from day one of your business.
We’re already picturing your objections. “SEO is hard,” and “SEO doesn’t pay off immediately.”
We hear you. But SEO can be one of the most important things you can do to build a sustainable, highly profitable long-term business.
Want some numbers?
Ben joined one dropshipping business about a year after the site launched. During its first year (before Ben joined), the site only got a tiny bit of organic traffic from SEO. In year two, after they started focusing on ranking for important keywords, 27% of the site’s visitors came from organic search (76,000 people!).
And those visitors brought in $854,000 in revenue!
The year after that, 243,000 visited the site after searching on Google. Those organic visitors generated $2,274,382 million in revenue for the site. And they attracted all those customers without having to pay Google for every click!
If you delay your SEO efforts, you won’t just be playing catch-up later. You might also have to undo decisions that inadvertently hurt your site’s SEO potential. Simple tasks like uploading products can become complicated if you don’t think about SEO at the beginning. Like when you’re launching your site.
You might find yourself deleting, no-indexing, or entirely revamping your site to line up with SEO best practices. Sometimes, this means a complete site overhaul, which can be time-consuming and expensive.
Consider two Ecommerce stores, Acme and StellarSells. Both launched at the same time. While Acme invested heavily in ads and ignored SEO, StellarSells put some money into ads but also focused on some initial keywords and got into content marketing and SEO right from the start.
Fast forward two years: Acme’s ad costs have skyrocketed due to increasing competition, while StellarSells benefits from a steady stream of organic traffic. Guess who’s building a sustainable sales funnel with a much lower customer acquisition cost? Yep … StellarSells all the way.
The Basics of Foundational SEO
Getting started on SEO for your dropshipping business doesn’t have to be overwhelming.
Learn the basics, and take it one bite at a time.
Here’s a simple guide to get you started:
Identify the keywords your target audience uses. If you’ve launched your store and you have some initial traffic coming in, start by looking at the most popular product pages and posts on your site. See what people are already looking at. Use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner or Ubersuggest to find more terms potential customers type into search engines. Or Ben’s favorite – AnswerThePublic.com.
Once you’ve found these keywords, integrate them into your product descriptions, meta tags, URLs, and content.
Pro tip: One keyword, one page. Don’t stuff! Serve your customers, not Google’s algorithm.
Speaking of content, a well-maintained blog can be a goldmine for SEO. Publish blog posts that answer your customers’ biggest questions. Write comparison pages that show the differences between your products and your competition.
Keyword phrases with “vs” are a goldmine in dropshipping!
Create entertaining and helpful content in your unique voice. Blog content like this gives you tons of opportunities to rank for top keywords, and also gives you links you can use to answer customer support questions.
And this one might seem basic, but it’s important: Make sure your site is fast and mobile-responsive. The majority of online shoppers use mobile devices, so search engines prioritize mobile-friendly sites that load quickly.
Remember, SEO is a long game. It might be tempting to look for shortcuts, but the rewards of genuine, consistent efforts are far more valuable. To get more details on the absolute best SEO strategies for dropshipping, check out our Dropship Breakthru course, which gives you a step-by-step checklist for setting up a strong foundation for SEO, right from the start.
How Is High Ticket Dropshipping Different?
Here’s one thing we know for sure: Choosing high ticket dropshipping is never a mistake.
High ticket dropshipping is a unique approach to online selling. Instead of selling lots of low-priced items, high ticket dropshipping focuses on a few high-quality, more expensive products.
So, why is this method better?
When you sell high ticket products, you earn more profit with every sale. This means you don’t have to sell as many items to turn a good profit. With fewer sales, you also spend less time managing orders, dealing with returns, and handling customer issues. This gives you more time to market and grow your business, spend time with your kids, golf, or whatever freedom you’re seeking.
Building relationships with customers is easier, too. When people buy expensive items, they often need more guidance and assurance. This gives you a chance to build trust, and that trust will keep people coming back to buy more in the future.
And when you source your high ticket products from trusted, proven local suppliers, you get:
- Better products
- Faster shipping times
- Fewer hassles
There’s another advantage: less competition. Since selling high-value products appears from the outside as slightly more challenging (though it isn’t), fewer businesses do it. This means you have a better chance to stand out. And even though advertising might cost a bit more for these products, the higher earnings make up for it.
The Biggest Mistake Is Not Taking Action
Launching and growing a dropshipping business has its challenges, but understanding common mistakes is half the battle.
By picking the right products at the right price, managing your ads well, avoiding copy pasta, and getting started with SEO right from the start, you can set yourself up well for long-term dropshipping success.
Ready to take the next step? Join our free course and find out how to build and launch your high ticket dropshipping business in just 30 days.
Want to start your own high ticket dropshipping business?
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Article by Jon Warren
- Worked with 400+ Ecommerce business owners to help them grow their business
- Started 3 high-ticket dropshipping businesses that reached 7 figures per year in revenue
- Managed marketing for his and his clients’ businesses that has produced 117,000 high-ticket purchases for an estimated value of $120.5M
© Dropship Breakthru 2021